“For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth; Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them,” Psalm 139: 13-16.
It is in the news that a draft of a pending Supreme Court decision that would strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that in essence created a right to abortion during the third trimester of pregnancy when the mother’s health was in danger. That decision created a slippery slope that has landed our legal system approving partial birth abortions for any reason whatsoever.
Abortions have always been available when the mother’s life was genuinely threatened. C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General during the Reagan administration, made the point that the mother is literally the life support system for the baby. If the pregnancy became life-threatening to the mother it was also a threat to the child and the pregnancy was medically aborted in an effort to save the mother and the child though it was not always possible to save both. But there is a vast difference in aborting a pregnancy and aborting a baby.
As the Psalmist penned it so well, life is sacred because it is “wove” by God in the womb. Roe v. Wade was a purely fabricated “right” to abortion when the word “abortion” appears no where in the language of the Constitution. The United States Supreme Court’s responsibility is to interpret the Constitution, not invent “rights.”
The Tenth Amendment, the last of those known collectively as the Bill of Rights, reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means the federal government, that is, the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch have no authority beyond that which is expressly given by the Constitution. Abortion as a medical practice has traditionally fallen under the purview of the individual states because it is not mentioned in the Constitution.
Overturning Roe v. Wade will return the issue of abortion to the rightful authority of each state. While I rejoice in its rumored demise, I also see that it will not necessarily mean the end of abortion for whatever reason. All Roe v. Wade did was to pave the way to make abortion legal for any reason, it did not make abortion a legal requirement.
Those who willing abort their baby for mere convenience do so because their hearts are darkened by sin and do not respect the sacredness of human life. Only changed hearts will bring the end to the practice of abortion.
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